Animation for Civic Engagement in West Africa

Rural African young people in general, especially girls and young women, are experiencing an erosion of citizenship awareness, making them victims of political manipulation to the point of becoming vectors of violence. In this context, the promotion of the culture of citizenship, human rights, democracy and peace is a major challenge that humanity faces today, and the Republic of Benin is no exception. Adolescent girls and young women lack knowledge and skills on civic education and engagement. They are not involved in the citizenship and development initiatives of their community. They don’t benefit from digital spaces and resources nor have access to digital platforms and networks to get these skills and knowledge in order to increase their civic engagement. They need to have the skills with tools and extended online equipment. This vacuum exposes them to early marriage and pregnancy. At the same time, their rights are denied. They are unaware of their rights as citizens to advance their ideas and priorities, and to contribute to improving their lives and those of their communities. In the 50 rural communities we serve, adolescent girls are becoming real leaders thanks to the system Batonga has set up, but they still need concrete leadership and civic engagement skills that will positively impact their lives and their communities. 

Adolescent girls in rural West Africa are being completely left out of the digital literacy transformation happening globally. While digital safe spaces and resources for girls do exist, a lack of access and skills is keeping rural and off-grid African girls from using them to express themselves, acquiring new knowledge and skills, and learning from each other. Digital literacy, a skill set that is increasingly important to girls’ development, remains starkly gender-divided in rural Africa. A 2019 UNICEF study found that in 8 out of 9 African nations surveyed, girls 15-18 years old significantly lagged behind boys in computer and information technology skills. Girls in Benin, and across West Africa are out of school without much chance of returning and without the skills they need to succeed. There remain correspondingly significant gaps in literacy skills as well; 53% of men and only 31% of women aged over 15 in Benin were able to read in 2018 (World Bank).

Adolescent girls’ inability to build and exercise their leadership and civic engagement skills in digital spaces is impeding the incredible empowerment journeys they are on, individually and collectively. Recent research has shown that digital literacy empowers adolescent girls in low and middle-income countries, enhances their confidence and decision-making abilities, and can offer opportunities to overcome challenges they face in the physical world. Digital access also helps expand young girls' self-awareness, increase civic engagement, participating in political life and decision making and awareness for their rights, as well as increase employment opportunities and workforce participation. On the contrary, their lack of digital literacy skills and access to digital spaces keeps the world from knowing their incredible ideas, solutions, and needs.

Our solution is to initiate a mass educational approach that combines the usage of new technology with education on civic engagement and citizenship. Practical lessons designed will be published through posters, cartoons and video capsules via existing online platforms. The idea is that if young people, mainly rural adolescent girls and young women can become leaders trained in civic education and engagement to be agents of change in their communities, they can be leaders and agents of change in digital spaces through Africa and the other continents. These spaces will create opportunities for them to learn, share, and lead, but also experience active participation in the society building, to master their rights, to be involved in real actions of their civic leadership and their citizen solidarity. 

Specifically, the solution Batonga Foundation is bringing will be based on the following activities : Make use of technological tools and equipment through existing platforms in the development of Batonga curriculum lessons for the benefit of program participants, their communities, the other communities and African communities. Producing cartoon programs, video spots on civic education and engagement themes. Community-wide cartoon and video spots projection events will be held with awareness messages on civic engagement projected in public spaces, as well as via local television channels and smartphones. The projections serve as a tool for community sensitization, raising awareness and promoting conversations on these important topics. After the community projections, adolescent girls lead discussions with community members and initiate with them some actions for civic engagement as displayed in the cartoons.

This solution will help to dismantle the barriers to technology, digital spaces and resources for more adolescent girls and young women in rural Benin through a three-step approach that fits the girls’ literacy, language and civic education needs: 1) equip them with skills through tailored trainings covering three aspects: civic engagement, drawing and skit writing to raise awareness through art, and digital literacy, 2) create and help them access safe digital spaces to create content and speak about civic engagement and also share their ideas for change and social impact in their lives and their communities, 3) support them in sharing their content and building partnerships within other digital spaces/forums to amplify their voices.

Our solution will allow 200 adolescent girls in rural Benin, who are current members of Batonga Benin’s Leaders Network to:

• be trained and increase their skills and knowledge on civic education and engagement; 

• be trained to develop valuable skills in creativity (drawing, skit-writing, cartoon creation), problem-solving, and self-expression, which can enhance their personal and professional lives;

• be trained on the use of digital tools and get access to digital safe spaces and 

• be trained to lead community civic engagement actions after different awareness shows.

The members of Batonga’s Adolescent Girls’ Leadership Clubs and Leaders Network are 14 to 18-year-old girls who live in rural and off-grid village communities across the regions of Bohicon, Savalou in central Benin and Natitingou and Boukombé in Northern Benin. The majority of the communities where Batonga works are either completely or partially off the national electric grid, have limited potable water access, and do not have reliable cell phone service. As such, the girls in Batonga’s programs often have significant at-home responsibilities, walking to get water, caring for younger siblings, and helping with household chores, for some, on top of trying to attend school or participating in professional training programs. While each Batonga partner community has a primary school very few have a secondary school within walking distance making continued education sometimes just out of reach for girls.  

Batonga prioritizes reaching the adolescent girls who are least likely to have access to resources and entitlements, such as girls who are out of school, girls who are two or more years behind grade for age in school, girls who have migrated away from their home community and/or family, and girls that are married or mothers before 18. According to WHO between 18% and 30% of adolescent girls are married before 18 in Benin and 20% of girls have their first child before 18. Batonga uses the Girl Roster, a smartphone-based data collection application developed by Population Council, to help us map our partner communities and understand the socio-demographic context for girls and women there and ensure we don’t leave behind the girls most in need. 

This solution will help build the confidence, public speaking, and digital literacy skills of the Leaders Network members by creating the opportunity for them to literally and figuratively show their creative assets. We also anticipate that the collaborative and creative nature of this project will help foster a greater sense of solidarity across the Leaders Network and eventually all the Girls’ Clubs.  By facilitating girls’ self-expression through content creation we will also gain a clearer understanding of girls’ needs and priorities which will help us further improve and adapt our programming. The visuals that Girl Leaders will produce will be more accessible to all of their peers, community members and will hopefully provide not just critical information about girls’ rights but also inspire other girls to step into their power regarding the civic actions side. Based on our experience with the Batonga program, the content creation will also likely lead to positive changes in the way that parents, community members, and local leaders view and respect adolescent girls as leaders. At least 7,000 adolescent girls and young women involved in the Batonga Foundation's AGL and WEE programs will directly benefit from this initiative. With the multiplier effect, more than 21,000 parents and community members will be impacted by this solution based on cartoon and video projections.

Batonga is an African-founded and majority African staffed organization that is committed to working with African women and girls to find solutions that work for them and meet them where they are. 

Batonga was founded in 2006 by the fearless gender equality advocate and award-winning Beninese singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo to transform the most vulnerable adolescent girls in Africa into powerful women. Growing up, Angelique Kidjo was one of few girls in Benin to receive an education. She invented the word “Batonga” as a joyfully defiant response to those who told her that girls did not belong in the classroom. Batonga’s staff of over 350 people includes various staff members mainly African. As an organization that serves African women and girls, we understand that we must be guided by and understand the lived experience of African women and girls. Batonga has been working with adolescent girls and young women in rural Benin since 2006 and we are committed to regularly engaging program participants as program co-creators. This solution, in particular, is the result of significant feedback from every level, from Batonga Mentors who recorded our first Radio Lessons and the first podcast episodes Gbêtché-Xo, to program participant girls who were moved and motivated by the new radio content, to community members and participants’ families who expressed their deep appreciation for the lesson content and the window into Batonga’s learning priorities. 

Our Adolescent Girls’ Leadership model, which has been in operation since 2016, supports new generations of girl leaders and changemakers as they grow and discover their own power and claim their new roles within their communities. Girls' Leadership Clubs provide adolescent girls, 14-18 years old, with accessible, private, physically and emotionally safe spaces where they can meet weekly with a group of their peers and a trusted female mentor to build their knowledge and skills as well as strengthen their voice and agency in their communities. Batonga has worked with our long-time technical partner, Population Council, to intentionally design our recruitment process and program model to ensure that we are reaching and accessible to as many girls as possible, particularly those who have the least access to resources and entitlements. Batonga is a learning organization led by the lived experience of African women and girls, committed to continually engaging them as co-creators in our work.

With the current approach of our solution that is raising awareness on civic engagement through comics, we were able to reach 2,000 young adolescent girls and women in our targeted intervention communities.

With the next stage of this solution, we want to reach another level by diversifying our diffusion channels to reach the maximum of people with messages building their civic awareness and making them take concrete actions to advance positive citizenship. That is one of the reasons why we are applying to this MIT global challenge, to be able to transform our comics into cartoons and make them available to anyone anywhere in the world. Also, we keep in mind that the communities we serve in priority are located in the hardest-to-reach areas, with limited access to television and to the internet. Therefore, we will buy the necessary materials to organize community diffusions in these villages and seize the occasion to encourage people to take civic actions.

While one of our challenges is financial, to be able to buy the needed materials, it is also technical. Because it takes good expertise to create attractive cartoons from comics, and to post them on suitable platforms. Also, we plan to train the adolescents and women we are working with in creating comics as well as cartoons. We know that a lot of our participants are gifted for or like drawing. This is an opportunity for us to improve their knowledge in that field, make them use art to raise awareness on important subjects such as civic engagement and girls and women’ rights, and show them how powerful art is to vehiculate messages and create positive changes. In that way, we might increase their interest and make some of the participants decide to embrace an artist career.

Therefore, technical support from the Solve community will be well-appreciated as we will need good expertise to create these cartoons, but also train the adolescent girls and women in drawing and cartoon creation. We also count on the community to popularize these cartoons beyond our country of intervention, by giving accrued visibility to the videos posted and make people from all over the world be interested and watch it to advance civic engagement in their respective contexts.

Batonga’s solution prioritizes reaching the adolescent girls and young women who are least likely to have access to resources and entitlements, this will allow them to build collective action to generate equitable outcomes, to be interested in community-focused careers and activities and to develop citizenship awareness to contribute to the development of their community, to feel that they have a voice to participate in community, state, national, or global governance.

Batonga's approach aiming to combine new technologies with civic education as well as citizenship engagement will connect Batonga network members across diverse communities and locations, allowing them to explore, share, and localize best practices. Digital tools and equipment used to create digital contents on civic education and engagement programs will integrate participatory approaches such as experiential and problem-based learning. Training will help Batonga managers and field teams connect civic learning more closely with the program participants’ lived experiences and adapt teaching and materials to their community’s unique challenges, assets, histories, cultures, languages, and systems. Outside Batonga’s intervention areas, direct-to-learner solutions through various channels (radio, TV, web platforms, and other social networks) have the potential to bring many other communities together by fostering greater peer and intergenerational exchange and collaboration. Across this solution implementation, civic education will integrate into practicing other strong skills and values like social justice and inclusion, as well as social-emotional competencies.

This solution will help build the self-esteem, public speaking, and digital literacy skills of Leaders Network members by giving them the opportunity to have their voices heard. Training them on civic engagement skills by improving their critical thinking will help them make relevant choices for their lives and make their own decisions. We also anticipate that the collaborative and creative nature of this project will help foster a greater sense of solidarity within the participants. The civic engagement awareness initiative combined with new technologies will be accessible to attract a large number of people and hopefully inspire others in different regions to raise their patriotic and civic awareness for the development of their country.

The main goal of this solution is to advance civic engagement in our intervention communities and beyond. We work first-hand with adolescent girls and young women from the most disadvantaged areas in Benin. By next year, we see them all become aware of their civic responsibility and take concrete actions to make it a reality for themselves and their communities. Through the community watching events that we will implement, we will create opportunities for our participants to speak with the whole community, perform civic actions with them and lead them to increase their civic engagement. The objective here is to reach 7,000 participant girls and women as well as 21,000 people in 50 communities across the country.

For the following years, and before the 5th year, we want to create partnerships with local television stations as well as the national public television channel called ORTB here. The objective is to broadcast these videos and cartoons nation-wide to raise awareness on civic engagement beyond our targeted communities.

At the global level, we see our videos on YouTube and on other platforms and social media reach millions of people who become more sensitive to civic questions and take actions in their local contexts.

On the aspect of increasing our participants' drawing, skit writing and artistic capacities, we want by next year to have a pool of at least 200 adolescent girls and young women who master comics drawing and writing, as well as other types of pictorial arts such as painting and portraying. Showing them how powerful art is to circulate positive messages and address our societies’ most pressing issues, will improve their capacity to express themselves for their rights and can increase their interest to become agents of change through art. We plan to support the artistic careers of the participants who would be interested. This support, combined with improved digital skills, will help our participants impact people at the global level, beyond their community and country.

Also, Batonga is expanding its model to Senegal, with an official activity launch coming by the end of this month, May 2023. For this first phase in Senegal, it is planned that Batonga reaches 6,400 girls and women from the most marginalized regions in the country. We will extend our civic engagement solution to that country in order for our awareness messages to reach more people. Also, knowing the coming electoral milestones in the country, with the presidential election in 2024, this will be the right moment to increase sensitization on civic engagement and responsibility. Therefore, we plan the extension of our solution to Senegal, by the end of 2023.

Our final desired impact is to see improved civic skills within our communities of intervention, and see populations in these grassroot communities, but also in the other regions of the world, adopt the right attitudes of positive citizenship with a better sense of their civic responsibility.

For our solution, we measure success through a number of indicators which include output and outcome indicators.

We measure :

• the number of participants who have improved social-emotional learning skills (self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making) in our intervention communities;

• the number of participants who report improved civic skills in our intervention communities;

• the number of civic engagement actions performed in line with the solution;

• the number of people reached during our community watching events;

• the number of people who watched our cartoons online and expressed a form of engagement;

• the number of girls and women participants who have improved knowledge in drawing, skit writing and other pictorial arts;

• the number of girls and women participants who have improved digital skills and access to digital safe spaces;

• the number of women and girls who report they feel more confident speaking and raising awareness about civic engagement in their communities.

Though the work that Batonga does is broad, multifaceted, and holistic in its approach, it can be boiled down into two primary intended impacts: 

1. Young women in our communities are more economically empowered. 

2. Adolescent girls are empowered agents of change in their own lives and in the lives of others. 

These intended impacts correspond, respectively, to Batonga’s Girls’ Leadership Clubs and Young Women’s Business Circles through the different projects associated with, like the radio programs and the podcasts for equality.

So, by choosing our solution, you are not only showing rural African girls that they matter, you are showing them that they can own their narratives, build their STEM skills, and become lead storytellers and changemakers in their communities, however marginalized or isolated they may be. If you choose Batonga with this cartoon amazing project, the prize will enable girls and young women to learn how to use cartoons, short videos and other digital contents in which THEIR priorities, THEIR dreams, and THEIR ideas are shared with the world and community members. With these resources, our team will reinforce building tailored digital literacy training for 200 adolescents in rural Benin, help them identify the best digital format to share their stories and voices, produce high quality and informative cartoons, in French and subtitled in English (created by adolescent girls and young women), to be projected in communities at night and connected to a safe online platform for girls to share their digital, educational, and advocacy content with the world as well. And while we are thrilled to imagine their content reaching hundreds of thousands of people, we’re even more excited about the part of our solution where other girls in Benin and West Africa get to benefit from those cartoons in safe spaces and networks. The Batonga leadership clubs will actively use these cartoons as educational tools for their members (we reach up to 7,000 girls in Benin), and support their creators as they pursue STEM focused education. Rural girls’ voices have been muted for too long: help us turn the volume up by giving us this prize!

Our solution aims to transform our existing comic strips into cartoons that will be displayed over projections within communities at night, local television channels, smartphones and to train adolescent girls on drawing and skit writing so as to enhance their artistic potential and to help them express themselves by using artworks. To reach this goal,  we plan to use these technologies:

• 2D animation software which is used to create traditional hand-drawn animation or computer-generated 2D animation. We aim to choose among the popular 2D animation software like Adobe Animate, Toon Boom Harmony, or TVPaint Animation.

• Digital drawing tablets to draw directly onto a  screen for the animated cartoon making.

• Sound editing software: Sound editing software is used to create and edit sound effects and voiceovers for the animation.

The realization of video capsules to be published on television channels, online platforms and the thousands of existing social networks, need the careful and particular treatment that will allow their downloading and visualization on any modern technological support. Batonga will call upon experts in the field to acquire the necessary equipment and software. 

Following the realization of the modern video capsules, modern projection equipment will be acquired for the community watching events. Similarly, smartphones and high tech tablets will be acquired to facilitate practical training. The sharing of skills with direct beneficiaries and the projection and mediatization of the approach on all broadcasting and publishing platforms will be facilitated.

Batonga is an African-founded and majority African staffed organization that is committed to working with African women and girls to find solutions that work for them and meet them where they are. 

As an organization that serves African women and girls, we understand that we must be guided by the lived experience of African women and girls. Batonga has been working with adolescent girls and young women in rural Benin since 2006 and we are committed to regularly engaging program participants as program co-creators to ensure the succession of tomorrow and the sustainability of the actions undertaken. This solution, in particular, is the result of significant feedback from every level, related to the implementation of our first civic engagement and good citizenship intervention that has positively drained community members and participants’ families who expressed their deep appreciation for the lessons’ contents and the window into Batonga’s learning priorities. 

Our Adolescent Girls’ Leadership and Women Economic Empowerment model, which has been in operation since 2016 and 2021, supports new generations of girls, young women leaders and changemakers as they grow and discover their own power and claim their new roles within their communities. Girls' Leadership Clubs provide adolescent girls, 14-18 years old, with accessible, private, physically and emotionally safe spaces where they can meet weekly with a group of their peers and a trusted female mentor to build their knowledge and skills as well as strengthen their voice and agency in their communities. Young women, 18 - 30 years old, in their circles are using their genius to create profitable businesses and income-generating activities that truly contribute to the economic empowerment to which they aspire.

This solution will provide these two categories of targets with the skills of civic engagement and citizen awareness that will gradually be transferred to the rest of the community through awareness campaigns and film screenings on the theme of civic engagement in order to ensure the sustainability of actions.  These positive changes will gradually spread to the whole community and promote its development.

We learnt over the communities we’re serving that video projections are impactful because community members lack televisions and do not even have access to the electricity grid.

Our solution plans to organize community-wide cartoon projection events, where awareness messages on civic engagement are projected in public spaces in the communities. The projections serve as a tool for community sensitization, raising awareness and promoting conversations on these important topics. After the community projections, adolescent girls lead discussions with community members and initiate with them some actions for civic engagement as displayed in the cartoon.

The idea of this solution is to transform our existing comic strips into cartoons that will be displayed over projections within communities at night,  the local television channels, smartphones and to train adolescent girls on drawing and skit writing so as to enhance their artistic potential and to help them express themselves by using artworks. 

By running this new solution, rural adolescent girls can develop valuable skills in creativity, problem-solving, and self-expression, which can enhance their personal and professional lives. We believe that everyone has the potential to be a change maker and we're excited to help girls unlock their creative potential through this innovative digital solution.

With the purchased equipment for this project, our goal is to keep them well maintained so that they can serve beyond this project. Then, with the other existing grants at Batonga Foundation, we will use their unrestricted lines to cover these little charges. By the way, the cartoons will continue in the same communities but also in the coming targeted communities. For instance, as we are expanding to Senegal to reach more than 6,400 adolescent girls and young women during the first phase, with the support of the Mastercard Foundation, we will use these comics and cartoons as materials to raise awareness regarding civic engagement in the new communities.

Our model based on mentorship had started in 2016 with MasterCard Foundation with about just $2,500. With this small grant, we set up all the models in 15 communities in rural areas in central Benin,  covering all the administrative costs, running the Girl Roster survey in all communities. We managed to create great impacts and have been able to scale today in 50 communities in central Benin but also, in the northern part of Benin. More importantly, we are expanding this model to Senegal (Sedhiou and Kolda) with multi-year programs from the same MasterCard Foundation. This is the sign of financial sustainability we have put in place. Also, we have been able to convince many other partners to join and support this model like Segal Family Foundation, King Baudouin Foundation, Father Uplift, Men Care Campaign, Global Funds For Women, Foundation for a Just Society (FJS).